Lia had already used her laptop to do some research on La Palma, the outermost of the flattened horseshoe of islands off the southern coast of Morocco called the Canary Islands. La Palma was an arrowhead pointed due south, twenty-eight miles long north to south, seventeen across from east to west. The airport was on the east coast, facing the nearby islands of Gomera and Tenerife; the Hotel Sol was directly opposite, in Puerto Naos on the west coast.
La Palma had been forged in fire, a volcanic island of basalt cliffs and black sand beaches. The rounded northern half of the island was dominated by the Caldera de Taburiente, an imposing ring of mountains that, despite its name, was not itself a volcano. A high, rugged spine of mountains, many of which were volcanic, ran north to south down the island’s center, almost impassable in places and dividing east from west. The spine was called Cumbre Vieja, the Old Ridge.
The last volcanic eruption on the island, she’d learned, had been in 1971.
“If you really want me to be your personal assistant,” she told him with a small pout, “you might be a little more direct and honest about just what it is you do.”
“In time, in time.” He looked worried. “For now, all you need to do is be beautiful, and you seem to have that down to perfection.”
Well, there would be time to ply him later, and there might be some places she could check here on the island. Something, she thought, just wasn’t adding up. If Petro-Technologique and Saudi Aramco were involved in a project on La Palma, it
What the hell were these people playing at?
Yet something was tugging at Lia’s memory about La Palma … and she couldn’t quite pull it out into the light.
“You,” Station Chief Charles Lloyd told Dean, “are a sneaky, underhanded bastard. I
“I take it our friend is talking?”
“We can’t get him to
“Well, we got lucky. We wouldn’t have had time to break him by conventional means.”
Lloyd was leading Dean through the twists and turns of some back passageways, ending in a darkened room where two more CIA officers sat with recording equipment, watching the interrogation through a soundproofed glass window. In the brightly lit room there, Koch sat at a small table, his interrogator opposite with a pen and an open notebook. Koch no doubt guessed that the mirror was a oneway window; it didn’t matter. He seemed to be only too eager to cooperate.
“Yeah,” Lloyd said, nodding. “Ever since Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, we have to be
Dean looked at him sharply. “You sound like you’re longing for the bad old days of waterboarding and electric shock.”
“Maybe I am. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t like the idea of torture any more than you do. It … it contaminates every organization, every person, who uses it. But how the hell do we break a man who might know where a bomb is planted, a bomb that might kill a dozen school kids … or a suitcase nuke that could incinerate the center of a fair-sized American city?”
“Torture doesn’t deliver reliable information,” Dean told him. “You know that. A prisoner will say anything,
“Yeah, yeah. And with what for leverage? The bad guys
“We seem to have done okay with Koch.”
“Sure … with you and the Russian guy pretending to be Mossad, and hinting that you didn’t have to follow the rules. He was practically begging to talk to us after that!”
The man on the other side of the one-way glass certainly seemed willing to talk freely. He’d been given a cigarette and appeared relaxed as he answered the interrogator’s questions.
“And when did you get your payoff, Lieutenant?” the interrogator was asking, the voices coming through over a speaker in the ceiling.
“It was in two payments,” Koch replied. “Half when I agreed to do this thing, half at Qurghonteppa, when I met the truck with the helicopter.”
“And how much were you paid?”
“Half a million euros. Half when I agreed, half when I made the pickup.”
“Why didn’t you take the money, fly back to Kabul, and turn in the shipment?”
“There was a man with me, a Pakistani. Don’t know his name. He flew with me all the way to Karachi. He was supposed to be my liaison here. They never said, but I knew he was also a … how do you say? A watchdog. To make sure I carried out my part of the deal.”
“Isn’t it true you were supposed to be paid even more money once you were in Karachi?”
Koch seemed to hesitate. “Well …”
“The Mossad has been tracking all of the financial trails in this case.”
“It is true. I was supposed to see a man at Jinnah this evening.”
“His name?”
As the questioning continued, Lloyd filled Dean in on what they’d learned already. “Koch was deserting from the German Air Force anyway. Seems he’s a member of a German Muslim group promoting jihad in Europe.
“He doesn’t quite look the Muslim type.”
“The VaG is radically anti-Semitic, though they’re careful about the invective for obvious reasons. It’s popular with the more radical flavor of Islamic immigrants in Germany, and is apparently picking up converts among the good, pure Aryan types as well. Especially in the teenaged population. Koch joined eight years ago, while he was in college in Berlin.”
Germany, Dean had heard, possessed the fastest-growing Muslim population in Europe, and at least some of that explosive growth was linked with lingering anti-Semitic prejudices submerged since the Nazi
“So Koch is a Muslim convert?”
“At least in name. The VaG started off as a radical skinhead group in the eighties. More into social protest and riots than worshipping God. In any case, Koch was also planning on deserting from the air force. Apparently a Muslim buddy in Kabul knew that, and got him in touch with the Army of Mohammad in Afghanistan. We’re getting a lot of leads there. We’ll be following them up for a long time to come.”
“So he wasn’t planning on flying back to Kabul.”
“Nope.”
“What was he going to do with that helicopter?”
“Abandon it at Jinnah. The Luftwaffe will be treating it as theft of government property on top of desertion.”
“So they’ll be taking an interest in our friend there.”
“Oh, yes. Big-time. They have people flying into Karachi tomorrow to take him back to Germany for court- martial.”
“Does he know that yet?”
Lloyd shrugged. “I don’t know. We promised not to turn him over to the Mossad, and that’s all he’s been
